Introducing a new Asset Store experience

It’s hard to believe, but it has already been more than 6 years since we launched the Unity Asset Store. Our vision was to create a space where community members could enable each other’s success: creators could make their content available to others to help fill skill gaps and help propel projects forward. For any problem you might encounter along the way, someone would have created the solution, and it would be just a click away.

Since its debut in 2010, the Asset Store has enabled countless members of the Unity community to find the assets and tools to help them build fantastic experiences. Today, with a catalog of over thirty-six thousand assets and tools, it has become a vital resource and an integral part of Unity. Nearly a million Unity creators visit the store each month to find a wealth of off-the-shelf content to jump-start their projects, overcome roadblocks, and make development faster and easier.

Over the past months, we’ve been working hard on improving the Asset Store experience.

Our guiding principle and goal for this redesign has been to make it easier for the community to discover great assets, services, and solutions to fit their needs and for creators to discover relevant content faster and easier than ever before.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we are kicking off the rollout of the new store experience, and a new phase of life for the Asset Store.

We will be rolling out access to the new and improved Asset Store over the course of the next few weeks. Make sure to keep an eye out on your email — we’ll notify you when the new site is available!

A sneak peek at the new home page of the Asset Store, complete with a revamped global navigation system for easier filtering, a ‘Quick View’ system for easier viewing of content, and new featured sections to highlight the best and most relevant assets.

So what’s changed?

Updated Global Navigation, Quick View, and Global Search

A common challenge we’ve heard from Asset Store customers is difficulty finding content. One of the core design changes we’ve implemented is restructuring the global navigation. We’ve added “mega menu” items, including a new 2D category, which will allow you to quickly find relevant content.

The expanded 2D section in the redesigned global navigation for the updated Asset Store.

To enable you to review assets faster, we’ve implemented a ‘Quick View’ feature that will make browsing much more efficient.

The new Quick View helps make browsing and finding the asset you need much faster and more efficient.

We’ve also added a search bar in the global header and improved search results filtering to ensure that, no matter where you are on the site, you’ll able to quickly find the content you’re looking for.

Personalized Recommendations and New Featured Sections

We’ve rolled out a brand-new, personalized asset recommendation system to improve the relevance of assets you are shown as you browse. You’ll be shown assets which are relevant to the types of projects you’re working on, whether you’re an artist, programmer, designer, or anywhere in between. In addition, content pages have been redesigned with a much cleaner, simpler layout to better showcase the content.

We also wanted to provide more opportunities for assets to shine. We’ve created several new sections on the home page and across the site to highlight featured and promoted assets.

Asset pages have been redesigned with a sleeker, cleaner look. Open up large pop-out image galleries, browse through a personalized list of recommended assets, and expand detailed specifications about the asset you’re viewing.

This is just the beginning…

This redesign is the first step in a longer-term process of ongoing evolution for the Asset Store. We’re starting with this design update and plan to continue adding functionality and feature improvements on an ongoing basis to better serve the needs of our customers and publishers.

When you receive access to the new store, feel free to browse and purchase assets on the new store to your heart’s content.

We are excited to be kicking off the next phase of the Asset Store’s evolution and look forward to sharing more with you on this as we go forward!

Please put the categories back to the way they were. Browsing by category feels much worse. As an asset store publisher, how do these map from the old categories? Many of my assets I publish simply aren’t findable by browsing any more…

The images should be switchable with keyboard arrows when the image gallery opens up, just like in any gallery.

The fonts are too big for PCs and too much data is hidden because it can’t fit from the huge font. The description shows too little without expanding, it should be in its own scrollable box like before. Clicking ‘show more’ gets this huge wall of text on screen that takes forever to scroll to other assets from there. On the other hand, recommendations are scrolled horizontally, which is at odds with the wall of text that has now appeared.

The top part is way too wide for a normal monitor screen. I can understand going wide in the Recommendations section but the actual asset part shows way too little for too much space it occupies.

Overall it suffers from the same web design problem as the forum that got rolled back: it’s less visibility and thus less usability. The same problems are all over the website too. The fonts are huge and the usability of classic PCs is suffering. Overall I’m pretty disappointed these flat designs are in vogue now, and this “wasted space is prettier” mentality is getting really annoying. Apparently lessons from the Forum have not been learned.

How is the Wish List sorted and why are there no options to change the sorting? (At least as far as I can tell). Also, for the purchased page, I think the category sort from the Old Store was a little better. I’d like to see all my 3D models together, rather than in some random category varying on the theme.
Also, when looking at the images, I’d like to be able to click left/right and use things such as the arrow keys to traverse them. Having to click each image manually on the left is a little sluggish and unintuitive.

Is this going to add “Asset Testing” feature? The cost of assets are exorbitant to try each one. At least there should be a feature after the trial ends, we receive the .unitypackage, so transaction is final, but trying an asset is really needed.

Otherwise we need to look for pirated copies just to try the asset, which is not rightful but current system pushes us to that system. Also as customers are picky for which asset to buy, the sales numbers stay low, but if we find relevant assets easily and testing successfully, our development can be quicker. As we can try as many assets as possible, we can buy assets that we normally wouldn’t buy too! Asset Testing is needed and it can kill necessity of many pirated-asset sharing websites.

From a graphical design point of view, it’s a nice improvement, it looks modern and fresh, I especially like having dropped the old, tiny, useless thumbs. Typography is good also, and the items pages look nicer (but you really shouldn’t have dropped the list of items from the same developer… WTF?!).
From an usability point of view, I am sorry but it’s not a big thumbs up from me. To do the same stuff as in the old asset store users need now to do more clicks on an average, or browse more pages, and that’s not a really good thing. It would have been nice also to keep the sidebar on bigger screens, why not?! It was really useful, much better than those annoying drop-downs at the top. Yes, they are fancy, so web 2.0 and beyond, but definitely less practical.

Then there’s the categories and classification system, and man that’s a disaster. I speak for audio, since that’s where I sell most of my stuff and… what the hell happened to the categories?
You should have added MORE categories, not removing some. Subcategories were also so useful (i.e.: electronic > 8 bit). Certain music packs will just get lost now in the hundreds of other packages which are not even of the same kind, just “music”.
A good example is a “piano-only” music pack. It cannot go inside orchestral, it’s not right, so it will just end in the generic “music” category. And in music, it won’t just show, since even if it sells well it will never become so popular… it’s not a super-mega-bundle, it’s not casual game music. So the only chance of being found is via the search, but people on marketplaces do not always perform a search, especially when they are not 100% sure what they want. In this case “piano” is an easy search, but there are similar packages who won’t be found just as easily with a simple word.
So, no, categories for the audio section should really do a come-back in my opinion, and get improved too. Not by genre, like rock, country, blues… genres are a bit silly in this kind of marketplaces, but dividing them in usage: casual games, retro 8bit, retro 16bit, fantasy, space/ambient, etc…

I hope you will consider my suggestions somehow… a bad user and customer experience will result in less sales for us, and if it’s bad for you, it will become a disaster for most of us.

In the new Asset Store Beta there is bug in the Favorites section, it does not show the full list of my Favorites, it just shows 36 items and there is no way to go to the next page and it does not load more items automatically when I scroll to the bottom. Please fix the bug.

Searching in the ‘downloads’ screen is incredibly slow – it may be a latency issue (Australia), or something else; but when you have a few assets in your library, it’s basically a good five minutes exercise to download/update something specifically.

Can you please do some kind of local non-serverside search/filtering on local assets? (also make it faster for big libraries); when the asset store is down, the downloads tab is far speedier and more reliable on the local-only view you guys have.

Would like to see improvements to the actual owned assets. I want an option to omit assets I already own from being promoted at me. That’s just primitive and dumb for a system that shows much potential like this.

I honestly can’t stand the actual display and categorisation of assets I own. It’s borderline unusable and I have to search for terms using the awfully slow #packages search box. I don’t freaking care for your hashtag design. I want a list of alphabetical products I own that I can quickly scan and get to.

I don’t want to be messing with linux or 1999 indexing to get to my own paid for content.

I’d like to see any asset I won NOT be listed. Whenever you search you get a list of assets, however most people have over 1000 assets. It would be nice id they were NOT listed or highlighter with a different color.

Using the Unity editor to access the store
1) Will it still take 5 minutes to load?
2) Will it tell up what version of the plug-in is being used in the project?
3) Will it allow you to print out the description of the assets you own?
4) Will it allow tabs at the top of the window so one can drag and drop bought assets into categories?

But as a UI designer, big list of sliding elements, that moves on a click of a button, this is great for touch devices, but really hard to look on a normal PC screen, I find that really exhausting to see :/

The ‘Latest’ feed is not currently in the new store design, however this feature is an RSS feed and can be checked directly or embedded in any RSS compatible widgets or software: http://u3d.as/feed/latest.rss

I can’t see the new version yet but it is not a day to soon!
At the moment the current asset store is gone from not so good to worse.
The highlighted assets are replaced by silly collections like ‘Rocks’, the staff picks are no longer linked on the main screen and the hole site is very slow at times.
NOT to mention the Asset Kits packs that are useless and weren’t expanded for months now. What was promised when we all where asked to go to Unity Plus and higher. So far the asset kits packs are one great disappointment.

So looking forward to the new layout and if the preview images in this blog are correct then finally 2D has its own private section.
I hope does asset kits are replaced or at least updated.

It’d be great to have a sort by “1st release date” in addition of “updated”.
With that, it’d be possible to easily track real new release in a section without crawling through pages of updated assets.
Thanks to consider this option ! :-)

where is the search filter.. its the only useful part of the asset store, and even then it could have been better..

now I see you just get a “Type here to search assets”

crap.. like this blog design

improvements to seeing past asset update history (cus its really shit not being able to see past change logs, let alone not being able to download a previous release.(the later I could understand not being an option for 500mb+ assets,))

honestly its good you guys don’t have completely competent competition.. yet.

Is there a way to search for all assets currently on sale? If I enter on_sale:YES into the search criteria, it only returns the item that is currently on 24hr sale. I see a bunch of stuff on sale now, and it would be sweet to browse through them.

Yes! ‘On_sale:yes’ is still supported, however, the 24h sale is the only item on sale at the moment. Also, if you have a Plus/Pro subscription, you receive 20%/40% off our asset kits, but these do not surface in the ‘On_sale:yes’ filter.

I have a Plus Sub and have picked up plenty of those assets. Very nice! … However, I see other assets on sale that are not part of an asset kit or 24hr sale. I presume these assets have been discounted at the publishers request for a set period of time. Is there a way to filter out these sale items to browse through?

Sorry you are experiencing this issue. We are aware of it and our dev team has been working very hard on tracking it down. In the meantime, please try logging out of your Asset Store account and logging back in, as well as trying different browsers.

I’d still like to be able to favorite a publisher, so I’m notified whenever they make something new or anything they have available goes on sale, rather than having to manually add all their assets to my wishlist.

Sales are searchable using the parameter ‘on_sale:yes’ in the search bar. As for custom/personal sales, we are working on a number of updates for publishers that will come with new features like this; we are still evaluating where a personal sales tool will fit on the roadmap.

I’ve already said in in the feedback form you sent via mail, but the site is slow as hell for me (latest Chrome on Mac OSX). The current asset store loads pretty fast and is a breeze to browse through. While i do like the new design, i can’t really enjoy as much as I would like. Any page change takes about 5-10 seconds, which is bad when you are searching through a list and quickly want to see the packages one by one.

Thank you for the feedback! The store is still undergoing optimizations and will be responding much faster. We ran some upgrades earlier this week that greatly improved loading times. You will see faster speeds as we keep adding improvements.